Crime and illusion: the art of truth in the Spanish Golden Age

Abstract

According to an old historiographic tradition, the Spanish Golden Age placed the imitation of nature at the service of religion: its radical naturalism responded to the deep faith of that culture and moment. Crime and illusion argues the opposite. It defends the thesis that the fundamental problem artists of the Golden Age confronted was not imitation but Truth. Moreover a large part, maybe the best part, of Spanish Baroque religious imagery is better understood as a complex exercise in addressing the spectators' doubts. Hovering on the horizon of an emerging empiricism, artists created their images as pieces of evidence, arguments for belief. Crime and Illusion reconstructs and interprets this judicial or forensic aspect of early modern visual culture at the center of a political, religious, and scientific triangle. Finally, the book explores the artists' skeptical reflection on the problematic relationship of painting and sculpture to the art of truth. --Preliminary page.

Contents

Introduction : the art of believing -- HIC EST -- The art of evidence -- The art of falsehood -- "False witness" : testimony as deceit, deceit as fiction -- Veronica : painting as figure, image as vestige -- The return of Nicodemus -- Blood and water : the art of willing to believe -- Afterword.